The present invention relates to a stall house for livestock breeding or, more particularly, to a stall house suitable for breeding pigs under sanitary conditions with great labor saving.
As is well known, the volume of the discharged excrementitious matter or, in particular, urine is especially large from pigs eating a large amount of the feed among the animals raised in husbandry. Therefore, economical disposal of the excrementitious matter is one of the largest problems in the pig breeding industry. A traditional method for the disposal of the excrements in a pig-breeding stall is to provide the stall house with an inclined concrete floor to facilitate collecting the excrements at and washing down the floor toward the lower end of the floor. Even by setting aside the very large investment for the construction of the facilities for the disposal of the collected excrements accompanying such a stall house, a very serious problem is unavoidable there in relation to the sewage disposal of the washings because discharge of such waste water is under strict regulations from the standpoint of preventing environmental pollution and such a traditional pig-breeding stall house is no longer usable unless a waterway free from the problem of pollution is available nearby.
In recent years, an improved pig-breeding stall house is under development in which a large volume of sawdust or the like material is spread in a thick layer all over the floor of the stall house with admixture of aerobic fermentative bacteria and the excrements from pigs are absorbed in the bed of sawdust in which the excrements are decomposed by the activity of the fermentative bacteria. The pig-breeding stall house of this type is advantageous, in particular, in the winter season because the fermentative decomposition of the excrements proceeds exothermically so that the energy cost for warming can be saved. A problem in such a stall house is the maintenance of the sawdust bed in an air-permeable condition in order to supply the aerobic bacteria with a sufficient volume of air indispensable for their activity and proliferation. Such an air-permeable condition of the sawdust bed can be obtained with frequent shuffling of the bed under fermentation taking a great deal of labor. When maintenance of the sawdust bed is insufficiently undertaken, the bed is trodden down by the animals so that the activity of the aerobic bacteria is lost to interrupt the aerobic fermentation and, instead, anaerobic fermentation possibly takes place to produce some noxious gases such as ammonia or the animals may eat the incompletely fermented sawdust to catch a disease thereby.